An Echo of Things to Come

The war against an ancient darkness is accelerating, and the people best positioned to stop it are the same ones history has spent generations trying to erase. Set against a world where an uneasy amnesty has allowed long-hunted Augurs to finally step into the open, An Echo of Things to Come raises the stakes of the Licanius Trilogy considerably — not just in terms of battles and politics, but in the quieter, more unsettling sense that the ground beneath every character's feet is less solid than it appears. Loyalties fracture, histories unravel, and the closer the truth gets, the more dangerous it becomes.

What distinguishes Islington's writing here is the precision of his plotting. Multiple storylines move at different rhythms without losing coherence, and the world's intricate magic system continues to deepen in ways that feel earned rather than convenient. He writes consequences with unusual seriousness — choices made in earlier pages carry real weight later — and his willingness to let revelations reframe what readers thought they already understood gives the book a rare quality: it rewards attention. This is second-volume fantasy that genuinely builds rather than merely bridges.